The New Myth of “Spiritual, not Religious” Through the
Gay
Window

Toby Johnson

The hundred years since
Harry Hay’s birth have seen a revolution in human society. The Universe
has been discovered, both
the incredibly tiny: particles within particles, and the unimaginably
huge: galaxies beyond galaxies. The human race has looked back on the
Earth from the moon; we have achieved a perspective no human being has
ever been able to before. For gay people the changes have been
enormous. Charles Dickens’ opening sentence from A Tale of Two Cities
truly applies: “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.”

It is considered an
important step in psychological development to be able to hold two
seemingly opposing propositions in mind at the same time. It forces you
to rise to a higher perspective in which best and worst are not in
conflict, but somehow coexist as aspects of one another. You see two
worlds: the ordinary world and the one from the higher perspective.

This bifurcation of the
world is at the heart of gay consciousness and it underlies—I would
argue—“the New Myth,” the stance of “Spiritual, not religious,” and
“the Gay Window.”

— — —

Heterosexual people
experience the world as radically divided between male and female. You
are only one or the oFloating manther and can’t be both. They celebrate
the conflict: vive la difference. But they also call it the “battle of
the sexes.”

Floating Man by Bill Biggers

Gay people grow up learning
to see the heterosexual world because it’s all around us, but, I think,
we don’t experience the difference. Our attraction is not across the
male female divide. In fact, we don’t seem to take the divide very
seriously. We can be both male and female at the same time—or neither!
In Harry Hay’s Radical Faerie Proposals for the March on Washington
Organizing Meeting, Harry talks about what he calls our “spiritual
neitherness.”

Our attraction is to another
self, another Subject, to use Hay’s famous expression. Our attraction
is not to opposites but to sames; our beloved is not an object to our
subject, but another subject like us.

We grow up discovering that
there are two worlds—like the two cities in Dickens’ title—the world
everybody else lives in and then the one that has homosexuality in it.
As we grow up, we might discover the real gay subculture that is a
homosexual world. But always there’s that distinction between the world
“normal people” live in and the world we live in because we understand
about sex and homosexuality.

One of the traits of the
“gay wise man archetype” is understanding homosexual and sexual
dynamics that other people don’t—and won’t—see, and therefore being a
teller of truth. A funny and poignant version of that gay wise man is
the mad drag queen with a heart of gold—a Bette Davis/Joan Crawford
character who is able to speak the truth that no one else dares to say.

— — —

This bifurcation of
worlds, I think, appears also in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who
seems to have been a homosexual, as the phenomenon and the noumenon,
the consensual world people generally experience and the real world. It
also appears in the notion of the bifurcation of nature by homosexual
astrophysicist Arthur Eddington, the idea that the writing desk is this
thing made of wood that is solid and the scientific reality that it’s
actually mostly empty space with tiny atoms great distances apart on
the atomic scale.

That gay people are raised,
inadvertently, by straight society to be able to rise to
a perspective—the outsider’s perspective—and see a straight world AND a
gay world and to understand the straight world as but one way of
viewing this is what I have called “Gay Perspective” and which Harry
Hay called “the gay window.”

Through that gay window we
are likely to see religion in a different way. Being able to understand
religion from over and above, from the outsider perspective is
something that, personally, I learned from reading Joseph Campbell’s
The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

I was a Catholic seminarian
when I was assigned that book for a college course on Jungian
interpretation of literature. I was dealing with understanding my
sexual feelings and identity at that same time. The comparative
religions approach demonstrated by Campbell helped immensely as I
struggled to reconcile my religiousness and my sexual deviance. I saw
that by rising to a perspective the two seemingly conflicting elements
could actually coexist and in a way that made them both better and
richer.

How
could I possibly ever reconcile [my
attraction to other boys] with some grand, altruistic life purpose?
This question, I believe, lies at the heart of the gay vocation in the
world, and of gay spirituality and sanctity more specifically. It
summons us to consider how and why we do what we do, and the reason
that our vocation so often lies in areas of beauty, creativity, and
service. Much has been written about the fertile manifestations of our
marginality. I will put forth a radical proposition, though it is
historically impervious to proof.

I venture to say that a significant, if not a
predominant, number of male saints have been homosexual, that they have
struggled with the meaning of same-sex desire in their lives, most
often for the person of Christ, that some succumbed to their sexual
urges, while others chose quite consciously to sublimate their needs in
works of heroic Christian virtue and fortitude. And, furthermore, that
such needs and desires, as evil, sinful, or condemnable as they were
thought to be by the saints themselves or by any number of
“godly” others, have been the core, fundamental forces for good,
motivating, sustaining, nourishing, and inspiring these great works.
(pp. Sanctity and Male Desire 149-150)

In his Preface to Queer
Spirits, Will Roscoe says:

Don’t we lead mythical lives? Even the most unassuming of us can
tell amazing stories of victory against overwhelming odds, self-respect
forged out of mind-boggling hate, invention and wit mothered by
inescapable necessity. When Joseph Campbell spoke of the hero’s journey
he should have used us as his example—although he never did. We’re the
ones who arrive at wholeness after an oblique journey to the margins of
the social order and back again, who suffer inordinate wounds and are
healed, who win the gift of “insider-outsider” vision and can therefore
speak with authority to men and women alike.

Some of you may know that I
only partly tongue in cheek fancy myself “Joseph
Campbell’s apostle to the gay community.” It isn’t so much Joe Campbell
in particular that I want to champion, though he was, in fact, a
wonderful fellow, but the stance of understanding religion and ultimate
truth from a perspective over and above. I associate all this way of
thinking with Campbell because he was my personal entry into it.

Because
I had a read his book, I signed up as a work volunteer for
a seminar he was giving the first year I moved to San Francisco; I
ended up on the crew that worked his appearances in the Bay Area for
the rest of the decade, and so was one of his “official followers”
(something he wouldn’t have liked—he didn’t want to seem to be a
guru—but he did like having people gush over how wonderful his ideas
were, especially young men, like the son he did not have. His wife was
a dancer and they chose not to have children for professional reasons.
Remember, he taught at a girls’ school, Sarah Lawrence College so
didn’t have male students. I was one of those bright-eyed young men who
gushed.

Campbell was interested in
what he called “the new myth.” That is, now that humankind has
developed a global culture with historical and cultural perspective,
and can see that there are different religions around the world that
are all terribly different, but are also just different manifestations
of the same thing, how do we believe them?

Could a “new myth” develop
that includes and explains them all? Could there be a new world
savior, like a Jesus or Buddha, who
reconciles them all? Probably not. There are lots of messiahs these
days and nobody takes them very seriously.

But maybe the concept itself
of how all the religions can be true at the same time even though they
conflict mightily might itself be a higher meta-myth that makes
overarching sense of religion even though the actual stories, myths and
doctrines don’t make sense anymore in any literal way. We need a model
which can explain all the behavior we observe, a theory that includes
all the points on the curve.

The image of the earth seen
from the Moon, for Campbell, captured this new perspective as nothing
else could.

— — —

I think gay people are
naturals for this higher perspective on religion, as we are for a
higher perspective on everything. Indeed, that’s a major characteristic
of so-called gay consciousness—seeing through the gay window.

This higher perspective that
Campbell alluded to—and that I think is what satisfies his question
about the new myth—has shown up in modern culture in the expression
“Spiritual, not religious.” This expression, of course, can just mean
that one doesn’t have any interest in religion and is sort of lazy
about such issues, but doesn’t think of oneself as a bad person
therefore. But it also tends to suggest that one feels a deeper moral
sense and higher spiritual sense than the religion of “believers.”

I want to
acknowledge Daniel Helminiak with the insight
that “spirituality” doesn’t require meditation without mythGod or any
of the other elements of religion to exist. Spirituality
is about human
consciousness. Daniel is, of course, author of What the Bible Really
Says about Homosexuality. He has many other books, let me mention
Meditation without Myth; What I Wish They'd Taught Me in Church About
Prayer, Meditation, and the Quest for
Peace.

At the end of Hero with a
Thousand Faces, Campbell wrote:

The descent of the
Occidental sciences from the heavens to the earth (from
seventeenth-century astronomy to nineteenth-century biology), and their
concentration today, at last, on man himself (in twentieth-century
anthropology and psychology), mark the path of a prodigious transfer of
the focal point of human wonder. Not the animal world, not the plant
world, not the miracle of the spheres, but man himself is now the
crucial mystery. (Hero, p. 391)

Since Campbell wrote those
words in 1948 or so, the use of the word “man” has, of course,
changed—in great part because of the women’s movement and sexual
liberation, and the new sciences he wrote of have come to include
ecology, brain science, and consciousness studies—even more about the
nature of humankind.

We’re only just coming to
understand what all this stuff means, but certainly one way of
reconciling all contradictory religions is by understanding them all as
about human consciousness. God and the gods are metaphors for our own
deepest identities. And we have to relate to “God” in a different way.

I think Harry Hay’s idea
that gay men relate Subject-subject, rather than subject-object,
resonates with exactly this concept of God. “God” is not an other, but
a reflection of deepest/highest Self. And so the way to relate to God
is as self to self, subject to Subject. The way to relate to the world
is to see it as a reflection and outflowering of one’s own
consciousness.

— — —

I don’t know that Campbell
had any direct influence on Harry Hay, but the comparative religions
approach most definitely did. For, according to the story in Stuart
Timmon’s book, one of Harry’s first encounters with the word homosexual
and the idea of love of a like comrade, not an oppositely sexed wife,
was with Edward Carpenter’s The Intermediate Sex.

Carpenter,
like Campbell would a century later, viewed religion from over and
above and observed that “Uranians” had played a pivotal role in the
development of religion and continued to possess a kind of special
insight.

The very idea of “Uranians”
manifests this. In the way that men are from Mars and women are from
Venus, so homosexuals —the 19th C sexologists proposed— are from
Uranus. Ignoring the blatant pun, we can understand that Uranus was the
most recently discovered planet; its discovery paralleled the discovery
of homosexuality as a category of human being.

— — —

The story goes that as an 11
year old boy, Harry hung around the public library and had befriended
the librarian. He’d discovered that there was a shelf of books in a
locked bookcase—one with the word Sex emboldened on the spine. He
convinced the librarian she should get one of these, then new,
permanent waves in her hair and since the only time to do that was
during library hours, he volunteered to spell her while she went down
the street to the beauty shop. While she was gone, he got the
key and opened the bookcase and there found
Carpenter’s The Intermediate Sex. So one of his earliest encounters
with homosexuality was as a phenomenon of anthropology and religious
history.

Harry got caught, by the
way, by the librarian when she arrived back with her new hairdo.

I’d say, following
Carpenter, that people we’d call homosexual or gay or queer—we have so
many distinctions now because we’ve had time to think about the
richness and variety of this form of non-heterosexual, non-breeding
consciousness—are always on the cutting edge of the evolution of
consciousness. We’re part of the prodigious transfer of the focal point
of human wonder that Campbell correlated with the New Myth.

Buddha by Bill
Biggers

Campbell’s wonderful retort to the accusation he must be an
atheist was: “Anyone who believes in as many gods as I do can hardly be
called an atheist.” But that’s an entirely different kind of not being
an atheist. Indeed, such an overview includes being atheist too—or
nontheist to use the Buddhistic term for transcending literal belief in
the myths.

— — —

Kenneth Burr Coming out
Coming Home

I want to observe that there is another kind of bifurcation
within the world of gay religion and gay spirituality. For some people,
gay spirituality means getting gay people to go back to Church and
become active within the religions of their upbringing. (e.g., Coming
Out, Coming Home: Making Room for Gay Spirituality in Therapy by
Kenneth A. Burr)

MCC and the various gay
affinity groups within the established churches represent this trend.
The Radical Faeries, gay Wiccans, The Body Electric represent the other
side of the bifurcation, rejecting traditional religious myths
altogether and conjuring up our own gods and traditions.

The comparative religions,
“spiritual” approach does not have to reject conventional religion,
though it does change how you understand the truth value. But on either
side, the truth value has to be reevaluated. Gay people within MCC, for
instance, for all they might seem to be “evangelical,” and
scripture-based, still have to take the Bible with a grain of salt.
They necessarily transcend traditional belief. You don’t have to
abandon your religion, but you do have to understand it differently,
more as an art form, like the opera or the ballet, that conveys beauty
and meaningfulness, but not literal truth. As 21st century human
beings, we’re simply beyond that.

The One in All --
Stevee Postman

This is the direction the
whole human race must be moving in; we’re, as usual, up toward the
front of the line. Remember the old joke that “when they’re running you
out of town on a rail, get to the front and wave a baton and make it
your parade.”

I would say that in the long
run the most important contribution of the gay rights movement is going
to turn out to be the transformation of religion.

I think Harry Hay would be
very happy with that.

Toby Johnson, PhDis
author of nine books: three non-fiction books that apply the wisdom of
his
teacher and "wise old man," Joseph Campbell to modern-day social and
religious problems, four gay genre novels that dramatize spiritual
issues at the heart of gay identity, and two books on gay men's
spiritualities and the mystical experience of homosexuality and editor
of a collection of "myths" of gay men's consciousness.

Johnson's book
GAY
SPIRITUALITY: The Role of Gay Identity in the Transformation of
Human Consciousness won a Lambda Literary Award in 2000.

His GAY
PERSPECTIVE: Things Our [Homo]sexuality Tells Us about the Nature
of God and the Universe was nominated for a Lammy in 2003. They
remain
in
print.

FINDING
YOUR OWN TRUE MYTH: What I Learned from Joseph Campbell: The Myth
of the Great Secret III tells the story of Johnson's learning the
real nature of religion and myth and discovering the spiritual
qualities of gay male consciousness.